Daily Archives: April 29, 2013

It could happen. In looking at the records of similar campaigns on the various sites that track them, projects can pick up as many pledges in the last two days as they did on the opening day. Camelot Unchained had a $550K opening day. You can see a pledges and backers by day chart here. So it is well within the realm of possibility.

I wonder, in a general Kickstarter campaign way, how certain aspects of the way things have been done have helped or hurt them. Mark Jacobs has been very forthright about the niche appeal of the game, and certainly the “No PvE content” aspect is sending some people away. But that is to be expected.

Other things though, like tiers that allow limited backers, do not appear to have been used… well? correctly? efficiently? To my mind, that is supposed to create a sense of artificial scarcity to get people to pledge right away.

The first four limited tiers ($25, $50, $55, $110) have a combined total of 25,000 “limited” slots, which is roughly 2.5 times the total number of backers up to this point. If your limited tiers are still open and available with only three days left to go on the campaign, I have to think they are not working as designed.

The tier price points also seem to be a bit confusing. In past campaigns, there has been a pattern of regular price points ($25, $50, $75, $100) which are often the limited tiers, and then a slightly more expensive unlimited tier above each that gives just a little bit less than the limited tier, to encourage people to pledge right away.

Instead, it is a bit of a muddle. Why would you have competing $50 and $55 limited tiers, for example? Why nothing at the magic price point of $100? I know $110 is just a bit more, but in my experience, $$100 is often a mental threshold.

And then there is what you get for each tier, which I find to be unnecessarily complex. The $50 and $55 price points mentioned above differ on so few points as to make me wonder why you would make them two separate tiers.

Ah well, brighter minds than my own no doubt have a narrative to explain the complexity. And they certainly did well selling the higher level tiers. Of the 75 pledge slots at $2,500 and above, only 6 are still available.

And it is too late to change any of that in any case. The next three days will tell the tale.